It's a lot like AWS. Yes, the uptime is likely to be better than your on-prem solution. However, unlike when yours inevitably falls over and has zero impact on anybody else, when AWS falls over it wipes out entire swathes of the internet.

Except now it's our food supply that's wiped out by the consolidation. I haven't bought bagged lettuce in months in response to this outbreak.

Smaller organizations means redundancies and options. Redundancy is the same thing as saying inefficiency. Redundancy is good.

I’ve seen where a local butcher slaughters the cows for local farmers, and it’s definitely nowhere near as sanitary as the meat packing plant I wrote some software for. It’s not dirty or unsanitary by any means but he just doesn’t have the man power to wash every surface several times a day whereas the plant shuts down one line at a time to do a full daily cleaning with power washers and this foam stuff that gets into every nook and cranny and then gets washed down a central drain. My limited experience with fresh produce isn’t much better (omg the flies).

There's a common pattern with other safety improvements that as safety controls improve, people simply push the envelope further. Cars get safer but then the drivers also get more confident doing things that nobody would get close to doing on an old car because it would spin out before then.

With the elevated standards of megascale agriculture you have the issue now where diseases from a lettuce farm in Mexico could affect somebody's health in NYC a month later in a way that simply wouldn't be possible in a previous era.

There's no complete solution but in this particular case it's important to remember that salads are actually pretty serious foodborne—illness vectors and they need to be heavily rinsed and ideally cleaned with a bleach or vinegar solution. It's one of the reasons that salads are traditionally on the no-eat list for pregnant women.

Also, I don’t think people have realized how much farmers markets now suffer from “dropshippers taking over Etsy” syndrome. Unless it’s a stand selling one or two specific things from a named farm or local producer, it’s likely you’re getting a lot of the same stuff that goes to the grocery stores, just at a markup.

Direct-from-farm delivery boxes are a better bet, at least the mainstay ones, but they’re certainly more expensive and the variety is more obviously seasonal (as you would expect).

Neither of these is a solution to nutrition at scale. It’s difficult to balance the economies of scale that consolidated distribution brings against the corruption that comes along with increased supplier leverage. Monopsony is just as pernicious as Monopoly (and they tend to feed each other, with large grocery and restaurant chains preferring large distributors).

Here's a pretty good video about the problem in general. https://youtu.be/nyG-np0S0ZQ

The jist is that a lot of this is from consolidation at all levels. There are fewer grocery stores and distributors which has ultimately made hard to know where food ultimately comes from.

Couple that with deregulation and the dismantling of the government regulatory agencies under DOGE and we get what we have.

Consolidation seems to have lead to massive price leverage for the winners and fewer choices for consumers, huge barriers to entry for small grocers and manufacturers

They also have more incentive and capability to optimize right up to (and past) safety lines. And the impersonal corporate distance from the pride in quality of production matters too.

With appropriate regulation and enforcement I agree with you, but in the current regime, I’m not surprised that foodborne illness in America has 10x in 2026.

> but if you think the people selling lettuce at farmers markets or farm stands have any verified food safety or food handling expertise, they don't.

I don’t think they have the oversight corporate farmers do. But I also don’t think they put immigrants into the field for 12 hour days with no breaks and no bathroom.

There’s something to be said for a farmer who doesn’t pass explosive diarrhea onto the crops he sells me as food….

"There are downsides to the consolidation of food suppliers, to be sure, but food safety is probably better for it."

Nope, quite the contrary. By necessity consolidation means fewer individual processing facilities, which in turn means any single facility services a larger percentage of the market. Given fixed odds of any given single processing facility being cross-contaminated by a dirty shipment, by necessity that contamination event will impact a larger volume of product due to bulk mixing. Additionally this cross-contamination event will impact a larger portion of the market due to now-commonplace multi-state product distribution.

I frequently hear "efficiency" touted in the context of the agriculture industry, always by individuals who have no involvement with it, and have to wonder what, exactly, they believe they are cheerleading. A loaf of bread is not significantly cheaper now than it was 50 years ago, so no obvious benefits to the consume accrue from this notional efficiency. What has changed is rural bankruptcy and suicide rates have both skyrocketed, with the consolidation of the AG industry consistently implicated as the primary driver of both.

Then food safety should be brought to small and local farms. The whole world does this, it's doable and works.

The high efficiency gains and safety disregard the environmental impact caused by pesticides and agrochemicals in general. These are much less of a concern in small farms when they have much less pressure to increase food yield per area.

I guess you're right that food is historically speaking extremely safe. I guess with this specifically, the issue is about how connected one company can be to the whole food supply.

A farmers market stand may not have perfect food safety either, but their outbreak would be limited to the few people who bought something on the farmers market (or maybe a cafe/restaurant or two that they supply).

Most likely, any harm wouldn't even be traced back to any individual salad because the sample wouldn't be big enough to form a pattern people would notice.

But because they supply so many salads to everywhere, it's a major issue that affects the whole food system.

I guess it's similar to an AWS outage. Companies constantly have outages, but an AWS one takes down half the internet.

I think people who don't understand our amazing food supply should read about the contributions and opinions of Norman Borlaug:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_Borlaug

> Food is being produced at a scale, efficiency, and level of safety unheard of generations ago

There are many sensible places between Taylor Farms and backyard agriculture.

Obviously it doesn't scale, but buying from small sellers has the advantage that the risks are completely decoupled. You might get cyclosporin or whatever, but it's not going to be a million people being hit by the same thing.

I think competition is still absolutely necessary with heavy restrictions.

Much of the consolidation locations of food production is how illnesses spread among farm animals. I could get eggs from a local farmer because their birds don't socialize around birds with the flu.

Just my take on the matter. It is important to balance the sources.

Yes, and...

When I buy from a local farmer I expect to wash my produce thoroughly, and if his product makes me sick I can come back later and complain to his face. If that doesn't fix the problem I can probably get him excluded from market participation in the future.

When I buy salad in a bag* at the supermarket, I assume it's been cleaned. If not, a lot more people than me will get sick and we have little power to make the faceless company change their ways.

*Just an example. I don't buy salad in plastic bags because I think that stuff tastes like cardboard.

it depends, there are certain farmers markets here in LA that have strict minimum criteria in terms of food handling, organic label compliance and food safety before they give a vendor a spot. Also, you can definitely tell just by looking at the quality of the produce of these places vs. the average Vons/Pavilions supermarket

And... once I stopped at a roadside farmer's stand and the fruit still had the grocery store chain label and barcode on it, just smaller stuff and perhaps older than at the original store.

i suspect the concerns are, if your food is killing people or making them sick:

1) how big is the fallout,

2) how insulated from repercussions are you?

if a small local farms food is making people sick, it will only be a few people and word will spread.

a small local farm could more easily go out of business from just a few sick people. the market functions correctly at that scale. if a major corporation does it, the market does not function anywhere close to the same efficiency and the fallout is 1000s and 1000s of people sick or worse.

i think what many are arguing is that the responsibility should scale along with the possible impacts.

Worse is, nonetheless, worse. You are sidestepping the issue that DOGE, and RFK Jr. have made things measurably worse in many dimensions. They, and the tech oligarchs whose money is regarded as speech bear responsibility for making things worse. But hey the TVs are bigger and cheap.

Deregulation and the evisceration of enforcement mechanisms isn't what makes food handling at scale efficient and safe. That's just nonsensical. The reason it isn't worse still is the inertia of his system that used to be better run.

Our current government is actively rolling back safety measures so these single points of failure become much more pronounced. I don't know but I would bet that companies like this are actively lobbying to have those safety measure reduced. It seems like deflection what you're saying. Yes, things are better than before, but they could still be better and trying to stop people from talking about that isn't helpful or wise.

"if you think the people selling lettuce at farmers markets or farm stands have any verified food safety or food handling expertise, they don't."

Really? At least here (Canada), you absolutely do need food safe certifications to sell any food at farmers markets.

"That's a fine way to get fresh food, but if you think the people selling lettuce at farmers markets or farm stands have any verified food safety or food handling expertise, they don't."

They most certainly do at my farmer's market, and every vendor has their certification posted for all to see, along with a health inspector rating underneath it.

Frankly, that sounds more like a fragile, hyper optimzed system that can can be brought down by a single point of failure.

I myself would trust produce from smaller local farms more than larger farms, however I also live near the farms and know what is in season and don't deal with the problems of people reselling food like they often do in "farmers markets" near or in large urban centers.

Small farms just don't have the pressure, or the large amount of disinterested or temporary employees that large farms have.

Same with smaller slaughter houses. Perhaps they don't have the manpower to deep clean every shift, but they also don't process nearly as much stuff, don't churn through employees as fast, more directly handle and train employees, and don't have some crap corner of the factory where people can be messing around being dumb.

Of course none of that is bullet proof, but small farms and slaughter houses know that if they fuck things up they don't just lose a bit of money and have to deal with some legal problems like Tyson or other large suppliers and distributors, they lose literally everything.

> allowed them to quickly pinpoint the farm that was the source of the Cyclospora outbreak.

Did they actually do this? All the reporting I saw basically amounted to “we have no friggin’ idea, shrug”. Unless you mean “Taylor Farms”, but that’s not a farm.

Edit: here’s the FDA page about it: https://www.fda.gov/food/outbreaks-foodborne-illness/investi...

They certainly haven’t “pinpointed the farm”. In fact, they have no idea which farm might have been the source. As such, this claim is completely false:

> “they have lot numbers and sources logged for all of it, which allowed them to quickly pinpoint the farm that was the source of the Cyclospora outbreak.”

Consolidation does not improve food safety. Read the ISO's. The standards of the industry are equally effective at a scale of 10 or 1000 different orgs. Everyone watches everyone else, and makes batches traceable, and those who don't are told to shape up by downstream, or they lose downstream consumers.

Consolidation's only benefit is shifting the fiscal gain into fewer pockets, which comes with it's own perverse incentives. (See the Boeing/Airbus duopoly and the problems that causes.)

Safety regulation isn't necessarily the point — an outbreak at a small farm is localized and might impact hundreds of people, Taylor Farms spanned over a dozen states, and this sort of scale is the sort of thing that can cause a epidemic.

The first step is to ban slavery in prison and strict regulation and fines.

Or you can say, that the outbreaks will be much more bigger as a result of centralization of facilities. For example one small batch could contaminate other lettuces in shared facilities.

This consolidation argument only works up to 1-3 processing plants. After a company owns more than that, there's no more efficiency from automation, only market dominance and abuse.

the guy selling lettuce at my farmers market grows it, transports it and sells it. if it makes me sick, he will hear about it, and i bet he has a very strong incentive to avoid that situation over a too big to fail megacorp that is basically insulated from consequences in the current climate.

do we need both options? probably. but painting small scale organic farming as'the same' as the alternative is...not accurate.

The argument from the article is when things go wrong (as what happened w/ Taylor), the damage is widespread, whereas damage is contained locally.